Boeing releases annual airline safety summary

The main goal of AirSafe.com is to provide the public with useful and reliable information about airline safety and security. One of the best sources for information about accident rates for specific airline models is Boeing's Statistical Summary of Commercial Airplane Accidents. The newest edition, covering the period from 1959 to 2012, was released in August 2013, and includes a variety of resources, including a summary of selected airliner crashes from 2012, as well as comparative data on the accident rates of various aircraft models.

This publication is very useful in part because it provides a snapshot of accident trends for different aircraft models and for different areas of the world. It is also useful for the AirSafe.com audience because it provides a different point of view. These differences are most noticeable if you compare AirSafe.com's safety review for 2012 with the list in the Boeing publication.

While there is some overlap between the two annual lists, particularly the crashes that resulted in passenger deaths, there are some key differences. Boeing, like much of the airline industry, has a focus on events that cause significant and unrepairable damage to aircraft, and their accident statistics reflect that focus. While AirSafe.com does make note of a number of nonfatal events, only those events that result in passenger deaths are used in any statistical comparisons on the site. Also, Boeing does not list events, even ones involving passenger fatalities, if it involved aircraft designed in the former Soviet Union, or events involving turboprop driven airliners.

In spite of those differences, Boeing's Statistical Summary is one of the industry publications that has very high quality data, and should be consulted by anyone who has an interest in airline safety, especially to answer specific questions about airliner accident rates and how they have changed over the last several decades.

Related resources
2012 Boeing Statistical Summary
2011 Boeing Statistical Summary
2010 Boeing Statistical Summary
2009 Boeing Statistical Summary
2008 Boeing Statistical Summary
2007 Boeing Statistical Summary
AirSafe.com's fatal events by aircraft model

Air France BEA investigation update from 27 May 2011

The latest BEA update on the Air France Flight 447 investigation, which was released on 27 May 2011, is based primarily on data recovered from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. This update is not a full or final report on the investigation, and only provides a small amount of the data that was contained in the black boxes.

The update indicates that the aircraft experienced a stall at high altitude, and remained in a stall condition until the aircraft struck the surface of the ocean. While the update implies that combination of pilot inputs and faulty flight data may have played a role in the crash, no probable causes or contributing causes were given.

Below is a summary of the events in the latest update:


- Three pilots were on board, (two-pilot cockpit)

- Captain takes rest break about two hours after takeoff

- About eight minutes later at 2:08:07, flight crew adjusts heading to avoid area of turbulence

- Starting at about 2:10:05, the autopilot and autothrust disengaged, and the crew took over manual control of the aircraft. Shortly thereafter, the airspeed indicated in the cockpit dropped from 275 knots to 60 knots and the stall warning sounded twice. Note that the flight data recorder only recored some of the airspeed indicators in the cockpit, not all of them.

- At 2:10:16, one of the pilots stated that airspeed indication had been lost, and that the flight control system was in a condition where it would no longer automatically prevent the aircraft from going beyond an angle of attack limit. This limit prevents the aircraft from losing aerodynamic lift and entering a stall condition. The A330 would however still provide stall warnings. Note that there is no angle of attack indicator available to the pilots. Angle of attack is the angle between the airflow and the longitudinal axis (an imaginary line running through the middle of the fuselage).

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Angle of Attack
The angle of attack is the angle at which relative wind meets an airfoil. The angle is formed by the chord line of the airfoil and the the direction of the relative wind over that airfoil. The angle of attack changes during a flight as the pilot changes the direction of the aircraft. Increasing the angle of attack increases lift up to a point. Too high an angle of attack results in a loss of lift, and can cause an aircraft to stall.

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- Aircraft pitched up and climbed from about 35,000 feet to about 37,500 feet

- At about 2:10:50, one of the pilots attempted to call the Captain back to the cockpit, and about a second later the stall warning sounded again. The engines were at a high thrust setting, and the pilot flying maintained a nose-up flight control inputs and the recorded angle of attack continued to increase, with altitude increasing to about 38,000 feet and angle of attack increasing to 16 degrees at about 2:11:06.

- At about this same time, the speed recorded on a standby instrument system increased to 185 knots, and was now consistent with the speed recorded on the primary flight display.

- The Captain entered the cockpit at around 2:11:40 (about 90 seconds after the autopilot disengaged), and in the following seconds, all of the recorded speeds became invalid and the stall warning stopped. This may not indicate that the plane exited the stall condition since the flight control system considers the angle of attack value to be invalid when measured speeds are below 60 knots. Also, speed values become invalid below 30 knots.

- The aircraft rapidly lost altitude, dropping to about 35,000 feet with a vertical descent rate of -10,000 feet per minute.

- The recordings stopped at 2:14:28. The last recorded values were a vertical speed of -10,912 feet per minute, a ground speed of 107 kt, a pitch attitude of 16.2 degrees nose-up,and a roll angle of 5.3 degrees left.

- The descent lasted about three and a half minutes, during which time the airplane remained in a stalled condition, with the angle of attack increasing to and remaining above 35 degrees.

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Join the AirSafe.com Discussion on Air France flight 447
AirSafe.com has started a new LinkedIn discussion group on the crash of Air France flight 447. Whether you are a LinkedIn member or not, feel free to add your comments to the discussion.

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Related AirSafe.com and AirSafeNews.com articles

Initial AirSafe.com Reports on This Event (4:10)
Audio: MP3 | Video: iPod/MP4 | WMV | YouTube

Additional Resources
AirSafe.com Flight 447 page
Synopsis of second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (French)
First BEA Interim Report (English)
First BEA interim report (French)
Other Air France Plane Crashes
Other Airbus A330 Plane Crashes
BEA Flight 447 page
Wikipedia Flight 447 page

Most Recent AirSafeNews.com Articles
Air France AF447 Flight Data Recorder Recovered - 1 May 2011
AirSafeNews.com article from 4 April 2011 about first sightings of wreckage

Other AirSafeNews.com Articles
Initial AirSafeNews.com article 3 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 9 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 10 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 15 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 19 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 26 June 2009
Todd Curtis BBC Interview about Air France Flight 447 - 9 July 2009
FAA orders A330 pitot tube replacements - 3 September 2009
Article on Second Interim Report from the BEA - 18 December 2009

Data Limitations of AirSafe.com and Suggested Additional Aviation Safety Resources

As many visitors to this site know, we have made a commitment to making AirSafe.com a reliable resource for airline safety and security information. While we strive to make the information in the site, and in related sites link AirSafeNews.com, Plane-Crash-Videos.net, and BirdStrikeNews.com, informative and useful.

AirSafe.com is the site with the most data, especially about fatal airline crashes, but there are important limitations to that data, and anyone who uses the site for research or for other purposes should be aware of the key limitations. Listed below are those key limitations, as well as links to additional resources that go beyond the range of what is in AirSafe.com.

The Events Most Closely Followed by AirSafe.com
The site focuses on airline events involving jet aircraft since 1970, specifically plane crashes and other events that resulted in the death of one or more passengers. Within the site are lists of fatal events for selected airlines and for selected aircraft models, as well as pages summarizing the key aviation safety and security events for each year from 1996 onwards. While lists for specific airline models may have events that occurred before 1970, airline specific lists have events from 1970 onwards.

Aircraft Types Covered
While some events involving propeller-driven events are included in the site, these are in most cases limited to aircraft models that are flown by major airlines in the US and western Europe. Most events involving smaller aircraft are not included.

Jet Airliner Model Limitations
Some jet airliner models such as the DC8. Caravelle, and 707, may be listed as a fatal event in one of the airline pages or one of the annual review pages, but there are no comprehensive listings for these models. Those models with a comprehensive listing, which would include pre-1970 events, are on the fatal events by model page.

Many of the newer airliner models, such as the regional jets from Embraer, don't show up on the site because they have not been involved in a crash or accident that was fatal to a passenger.

Not all fatal airliner crashes are included in the site, and some that are are not counted when it comes to computed event rates for aircraft models. For example, after the March 2009 FedEx crash in Tokyo, a new page was added for FedEx that included that notable FedEx accidents and other events, but none of those events would have counted towards AirSafe.com's fatal event rates for those aircraft models because FedEx had no events involving passengers. Also excluded from the statistics are flights where the public could not buy a ticket. Private or military accidents involving airline type aircraft are excluded, for example the crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown that involved an Air Force CT-43 (a modified Boeing 737) .

Computation of Fatal Event Rates
The page listing fatal event rates for selected airlines or fatal events rates for selected models use a specific formula
for creating the values that takes into account the percentage of passengers killed . While only events killing passengers are included in the calculations, the number of flights for an aircraft model include types of flights, such as cargo flights, that are normally not considered by AirSafe.com. The effect is that fatal event rates are slightly lower than they would be if I strictly limited flight operations data to
relevant passenger flights.

AirSafe.com Definitions
AirSafe.com uses terminology such as 'fatal event' that is unique to the site and is distinctly different from safety and accident related terms used by organizations such as ICAO and NTSB.

Sources of Information
AirSafe.com only uses information that is accessible to the general public. While some of the the most detailed and wide ranging sources of information are available online, other offline sources have been used as well. The most reliable online sources include the accident and incident databases of the NTSB (you can search the entire database or search it by month) and FAA, as well as these resources:

Flight International Magazine has an excellent annual roundups of accidents and serious events (written by David Learmount), and they can be found through the site http://www.flightglobal.com. You have to use their internal search engine to find safety reviews, but it is worth it. Evey year the magazine publishes a comprehensive review of airline accidents and incidents, typically in one of the January issues of Flight International magazine.

The Aviation-Safety.net web site has a very comprehensive listing of accidents, incidents, and fatal events, plus a very easy to navigate online database of events.

The New York Times has usually been head and shoulders above most newspapers when it comes to details about famous events and many of the more obscure ones. They also allow online searches of their entire history of articles.

There are a few offline sources that may be much harder to get to, but
if you find them it could be quite useful:

NTSB: Many of their older (pre mid-1990s) studies and accident reports
are not online, but could be in Federal Depository libraries or some
university Libraries.

ICAO: This UN organization publishes accident summaries from around the world. Although many are in English, some are not. If you can find them at all, it will likely be at larger research libraries.

Creating Your Own Analysis Method
One last resource you may want to use is from the book ,
Understanding Aviation Safety Data. Written by AirSafe.com's creator Dr. Todd Curtis, one of its chapters describes in detail the general method used to create much of the content of AirSafe.com. You can download this chapter at http://www.airsafe.com/analyze/chap6_curtis.pdf. You can also take a free email-based course that covers the same material as this chapter. You can sign up for the "How to Ask an Aviation Safety Question" class at classes.airsafe.org and get the lessons mailed to you over the course of a few weeks.

How to Protect Your Laptop and Your Computer Data When Going Through Airport Security

The recent arrests of the couple accused of stealing over 1,000 checked bags from the Phoenix airport highlighted one of the baggage theft risks that airline passengers face each time they fly. Another ongoing problem inside the airline terminal is the risks passengers face of having their laptop computer lost, stolen, or damaged.
The two areas of risks are taking the computer through security and inside the airport terminal.

Putting Laptops in Checked Baggage
There is a very simple way to avoid this problem-just don't do it. There is the obvious risk of a lost, damage, or stolen checked bag. Also, airlines often load bags on top of one another in the cargo hold of your flight. Hundreds of pounds of pressure in conjunction with the low temperatures in unheated cargo compartments may lead to cracks or damage to the laptop screen or damage to other components.

Taking the Laptop Through Security
In the US and in most other countries, laptops have to be taken out of its carrying case or out of your carry-on bag as you go through the x-ray scanners at airport security. To protect your laptop, you should do the following:

• Place laptops in a bin by itself before you put it through the x-ray machine.
  
• Keep your laptop in sight at all times. You may be delayed getting through the metal detector or you may be pulled aside for additional screening. If this happens, make sure you keep your laptop in sight. If you are traveling in a group, one thing that you can do is to have the first person through security be the person who takes care of all the laptops.
  
• Reclaim and secure your laptop as quickly as possible once you are through the screening process.

Laptop Security in the Terminal
If you decide to use your laptop during the time before boarding, take the same precautions that you would in any other public space. Don't leave your laptop unattended, and if you the airport has free wi-fi access, avoid doing anything online such as online banking that requires a secure connection.

Other Laptop Security Hints
In addition to protecting your laptop from loss, damage, or theft, you should also take the time to protect the information on the laptop. One way to do that is to separate the data from the laptop. For most users, the information on a laptop is far more valuable than the laptop itself. One easy way to protect against the loss of data is to either backup your data before you travel, or plan to keep any important or sensitive data data separate from the laptop in a device such as a flash drive, CD-ROM, or or external hard drive. Of course, these data storage devices should always be with you or with your carry-on bag, and not in any checked bag.

If you are unwilling or unable to separate the data from the laptop, at least put some kind of password protection on the laptop or on individual files or directories within the laptop.

One way to avoid the hazards and hassles of taking your laptop out for security screening is to use alternative electronic devices. Unlike the situation with laptops, special screening is not required for small data-related devices like Internet enabled phones such as the iPhone or Blackberry, PDAs, flash drives, and other small data-related devices.

Related Resources
Baggage Basics for Checked and Carry-on Items
Carry-on Baggage Advice
Top 10 Baggage Tips
Top Ten Tips for Dealing with Security
Overhead Baggage Risks
Hazardous and Prohibited Baggage Items

Newly Published Boeing Resource on Airline Accidents

The primary mission of AirSafe.com is to provide airline passengers and aviation professionals with reliable information about plane crashes and other issues or events related to aviation safety and aviation security. AirSafe.com and the AirSafe.com Foundation can't do this alone. They both rely on publicly available information for news events like recent crashes and for reliable data for determining things like fatal event rates for aircraft models.

Some data, like plane crashes and accident investigation reports, are very easy to find, often widely publicized, and sometimes published by authoritative sources like government agencies. Other data, for example the number of airplane flights for a particular model, are much harder to find. One of the best sources for information about accident rates for specific airline models is an annual publication from Boeing, the Statistical Summary of Commercial Airplane Accidents. The newest edition, covering 2008, was published in July 2009, and it provides a summary of last year's accidents as well as comparative data on the accident rates of various aircraft models.

Some of the key data from this publication is included within AirSafe.com, especially the Fatal Events by Aircraft Model page. Boeing's Statistical Summary is one of the industry publications that has very high quality data, and should be consulted by anyone who has an interest in airline safety, especially to answer specific questions about airliner accident rates and how they have changed over the last several decades.


You can download the most recent edition which covers 2008, and the previous one covering 2007 below. If you have an interest in how data like this is used to answer complex aviation risk and safety questions, you can also download two resources from AirSafe.com: selected portions of the book Understanding Aviation Safety Data from AirSafe.com founder Dr. Todd Curtis, or you can register for the free online class on how to systematically ask and answer an aviation safety question.

2008 Statistical Summary
2007 Statistical Summary
Online Class: How to Ask an Aviation Safety Question
Chapter 6 of Understanding Aviation Safety Data

FAA Backs Down - Will Release Bird Strike Database to Public

Just two days after the deadline for submissions of public comments about their proposal to severely restrict public access to a major bird strike database, the Department of Transportation has overruled the FAA and has announced that the FAA will go in the opposite direction, releasing virtually every bit of data to the public.

The FAA is scheduled to make the database available online on Friday April 24th at http://wildlife-mitigation.tc.faa.gov/public_html/index.html#access I contacted the FAA on the 23rd, and I was told that there will by 94 data fields available, including just about everything except the phone number of the submitter.

This level of public disclosure is above and beyond the minimum that I suggested in my comments to the FAA, and well beyond what I expected to happen. I certainly look forward to reviewing the database when it becomes available.

For the AirSafe.com audience, I will continue to offer support to anyone who has questions about how to analyze the data. If you do have questions or comments, feel free to contact me at feedback.airsafe.org.

FAA Wrong to Hide Bird Strike Data

As many of you know, AirSafe.com is a big proponent of allowing the public to have free and open access to aviation safety data. The FAA has proposed regulatory changes that would restrict some bird strike data from public access. The stated reason is that by keeping the data out of public view, that it would be easier to get airports, airlines, and others to volunteer more data.

While that may seem to be a good reason to the FAA, in my opinion this would be a bad policy change. In the coming public comment period, which ends next month AirSafe.com will have quite a bit more to say on the subject. In the meantime, check out the following resources in recent Twitter updates from AirSafe.com:

In 2007 NASA tried to hide safety data as well. Visit http://tinyurl.com/cqgtgb to see my opinion and a podcast on that issue.

How important is a missing piece of bird strike data? Visit http://tinyurl.com/ckw9w5 and see just one example.

The FAA shouldn't keep bird strike information a secret. I'll say more later, but until then check out http://birds.airsafe.org.

If you use Twitter, please go to http://www.twitter.com/airsafe and start following AirSafe.com.

Not a Twitter user yet? This is a good time to check it out. Join Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/airsafe and see if this technology can work for you.